The main type of Trends and Challenges in Production and Operations Management (POM) are;
1. Productivity
Productivity is defined as ratio of output to input. Productivity is one of the key performance indicators showing how well the organization is and country is performing. Productivity is a relative measure. In other words it should be meaning full. It should be compared with something else. A company can com pare productivity with itself over time or it can compare the productivity with other firms. Productivity can be express as partial measure, Multifactor measure or total measure.
1.1 Partial Productivity
Ratio of output to a single input for example labor, raw material, Capital is known as Partial Productivity.
1.2 Multifactor Productivity
Ratio of output to more than one input is called multifactor productivity.
1.3 Total Productivity
Ratio of total output to total input is called total productivity.
2. Global Competitiveness
Businesses have to consider supplier, customer, facility location and competitors on Global level. Removal of trade barriers have made easy for companies to conduct business all over the world. For Pakistani industries it is now increasingly important that they should focus on their operations in order to remain comparative in the world.
3. Technological Improvement
One critical element in today’s operation is rapid technological change. It affects the design of products and firms processes. Internet has changed the way the suppliers and customer interact with businesses.
4. Ethical Changes
Businesses have ethical challenges as they move from their countries to new location. Some countries are more sensitive towards bribery, Discrimination against minority, child labor, women harassment, mini wage and worker rights, similarly there is an increasing awareness regarding environmental protection policies of company.
5. Operation Strategy
Operation strategy is long term planning regarding operation of business. It deals with process design. And infrastructure leaded to support the process, process design include decision regarding location of facilities selection of appropriate technology and inventory management system. Infrastructure decision includes quality assurance and control procedures and general organization of the operation.
6. Operation Competitive Dimension
They are the criteria on which an organization decides to compete. Some of the dimensions are as follow:
6.1 Cost
Make the product or service cheaper. When the firm decides to compete purely on the basis of cost it should remember that such products and services are commodity like in other words customers cannot distinguish the product or service of one firm from that of another such segment of market is very large the competition is fierce and so is the failure rate.
6.2 Quality
Quality of product means that the product is worth the customer desire. There are two characteristic that define quality that are process quality and design Quality. Design quality refers to the feature that the product or service contain. These are the features that reflect to the desires of customer. Overly design and under design are not liked by customer. Process quality refers to the durability of product or it means defect free.
6.3 Delivery Speed
Delivery speed means delivering the product or service quickly in some industries like postal service the delivery speed is the critical characteristic. A company characteristic along with delivery speed is delivery reliability which means delivering when promise.
6.4 Flexibility
Flexibility means providing the customer with range of products. It also means having processes that can be modified to offer new product.
December 17, 2018